Tetsuya Mizuguchi: A Child of Technology

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We speak to the Child of Eden creator and maestro about his past, present and future.

By Stephen Lambrechts

A thoughtful and soft-spoken man, Tetsuya Mizuguchi is one of the brightest stars of the Japanese game development scene. Known for his almost euphoric melding of music with gameplay, he is a unique breed of game designer; as comfortable taking inspiration from rave parties as he is the Russian abstract artist Kandinsky. In this interview, we explore how his vision has evolved, from his first game – Sega Rally Championship, to the upcoming Child of Eden.

What is it about Mizuguchi that leads to such original and unconventional game releases? Perhaps it is the fact that he never actually intended to become a game designer until he interviewed at Sega at the beginning of his career. "I'm a rare case," he says. "I said at my first interview at Sega 'I don't want to make a game, I want to make future entertainment'." Video games offered countless intriguing possibilities for Mizuguchi. "What is a game? What is the difference between games and movies? What is passive, and what is active? What do you feel when you play a game or watch a movie? You can't cry when you play a game, but you can cry when you watch a movie. What is the difference? We need to know why."

It is this type of ideology that would see the prolific game designer go from making more traditional video games such as the hugely successful Sega Rally Championship, to games that worked within his vision as an artist and auteur. The first seeds of his musically-inclined vision bore the stylish music and dance-inspired game Space Channel 5, and he didn't look back, moving on to the sonically-euphoric and futuristic Rez, and the trance-inducing Lumines. The concept of creating emotions and feelings from a multi-sensory experience, known as synaesthesia, became something Mizuguchi would continue exploring for most of his career.

Space Channel 5 Part 2 is coming to XBLA and PSN, but what about a new Kinect game?

"I had many inspirations for the synaesthesia. My first rave party in 1994-95, with all the techno music, lights, colours, a group of a thousand people dancing, almost moving as one with the music. That was very shocking to me… in a good way! I was reminded of that and Kandinsky's concept of synaesthesia. I thought, 'If I could bring this kind of feel to a game, what kind of game can I make?' I didn't have any answers at that time. I needed time. So maybe three or four years later, I had a very funny image of something - visuals and sounds, a spark like that. Then I was getting the music. We tested many types of this kind of process, and that's how we made Rez."

"The concept of synaesthesia is like that," he continues. "From Techno rave, from an artistic approach, all the time I have inspirations of [what it might be like] if artists from many years ago lived now, and if they had used a computer instead of a white canvas, what kind of thing would they want to produce and make? I feel like we're just succeeding with making that kind of experience."

Synaesthesia in gaming is born with Rez.

The vehicle for these kinds of experiences, Mizuguchi feels, ultimately comes down to the technology available to him at the time, and how he can utilise that tech into a game that people would find fun. "I get much inspiration from new technology all the time," he said. "When I saw the PSP at first, it was like an interactive audio-visual Walkman. You could play games, you can touch, play the music, and I had the inspiration of people touching and playing the music with their headsets, any time and any style." These ideas lead Mizuguchi to ask himself "What kind of game does everybody want to play? That was the inspiration. Not only complex games, but very simple games - playing with music but also [making it] very fun. So from that kind of big imagination, came Lumines."

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I don't want to make a game - I want to make future entertainment.

So what kind of inspiration did he receive from the hands-free technology of Microsoft's Kinect platform? "When I saw the Kinect technology, I thought 'this is like a conductor!' So if you could play the game like a conductor, what kind of sound and visual effects can we make? How can we make a FUN FUN FUN kind of game? That's my kind of process. Technology is very important for games; games are not just game games, they've become interactive entertainment."

Lumines re-invented the puzzle game into a dazzling audio-visual feast.

This idea spawned Child of Eden, Mizuguchi's latest game. As kind of a spiritual-successor to Rez, Child of Eden sees Lumi, the first star-child born in outer space, living harmoniously within a higher, evolved version of the internet amongst archives filled with memories and emotions. When viruses start attacking her world, it becomes the job of the player to revitalise and purify her world once again.

Where the world of Rez was colder and more based in technology, Mizuguchi wanted Child of Eden to have a different feeling altogether. "The challenge for Child of Eden was to make it much more organic and happy, as well as very emotional," he said. "I needed the music - many types of music - and also I needed to use a character as a metaphor… it's like a narrative. I wanted to use physics technology to create chemistry out of the music and visuals. It wasn't easy, but I wanted to make a kind of new chemistry. It was a challenge!"

Child of Eden's character Lumi provides an emotional core to the game.

Emotional response is very much a running theme in Mizuguchi's vision for his games, but does he believe that games are ready to be considered a legitimate artform? "I think… not yet. But it's getting close. It's just beginning. The experience is getting greater in the games industry. Just 40 years ago, we started from black and white dots. No sound, just beep sounds. Then we got colours, 2D then 3D… but we will have a much greater evolution in future games."

With this in mind, Mizuguchi still looks forward to future of the medium. "Maybe we won't be able to tell the difference between real images and generated images," he says. "Maybe we'll be able to see a movie and stop to change the point of view in the future. We need to prepare all the time. We need that kind of inspiration." So what do games need to do in order to be accepted as art? "I think we need to wait, and use new technology in new directions of inspirations. It's a very wonderful area - it's not like movies or TV. There's no shape, no limit, just freedom."

This is a seriously beautiful game.

So where does the future lie for Tetsuya Mizuguchi and his company Q Entertainment? When asked about the possibility of a resurgence of his Space Channel 5 series with real dance moves for Kinect, a huge smile breaks his face. "Hmm… you know… that's very interesting [laughs]. Space Channel 5 is Sega's property, so I suppose we could have a chance to talk with Sega. Might be very interesting!"

With his admission that he finds inspiration in new technology, we thought it appropriate to end the interview by asking Mizuguchi about the possibility of a Q Entertainment game coming to Sony's NGP. A new Lumines title, perhaps? Mizuguchi smiled at me with a very long pause, as if I might be on to something. It was also clear that internally, he was also devising a carefully-worded response. "NGP… is a very interesting platform. We will, that is - Q Entertainment - will make something on NGP… but we haven't announced it yet. I like those kinds of platforms very much."